


Sherlock Holmes, Reluctant Wizard

by suitesamba



Series: The Wand Series [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magical Sherlock, Muggle John, Potterlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-26 23:20:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5024572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitesamba/pseuds/suitesamba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now that John knows that Sherlock is a wizard, there's no reason to keep hiding his wand. But John finds that there are other things Sherlock is hiding, like a very useful spell book that, if Sherlock would just learn the damn things again, would solve a lot of household problems and perhaps even enhance other areas of their lives. Sherlock, however, is quite resolved to use his brain and not magic, except, perhaps, when it comes to getting him out of tight spots (or getting him into them).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sherlock Holmes, Reluctant Wizard

**Author's Note:**

> This story follows "Five Times John Saw Sherlock's Wand" and is Part 2 of "The Wand Series." The first story provides the canon backstory to explain why Sherlock is a wizard who carries - but seldom uses - his wand, and how John discovered this.

Life with magical Sherlock wasn’t all too different than life with the standard-issue, everyday brilliant Sherlock. 

To say Sherlock was a reluctant wizard was somewhat of an understatement. He’d been schooled in magic in his younger years, but had convinced his parents to enroll him in public school in London in fifth form. And as he greedily absorbed the periodic table and Avogadro’s number and squirreled away nitric and sulfuric acid for home experimentation, the rote spells of his childhood with their bastardised Latin had somehow faded, or perhaps, been purposefully deleted to make space for more critical knowledge.

Magic, to Sherlock Holmes, was a tool that diminished him rather than illuminated him. It was not something he achieved through intellect and the brilliant application of scientific principles, but an inconvenient ability with which he was inflicted at birth. Not that he wasn’t above using it when absolutely necessary – the _Expecto Patronum_ to Mycroft when he’d been shot an excellent case in point – but in general, he wanted his successes to be unquestioned and truly his own. The mere appearance of _cheating_ was humiliating - and fortunately, only a very few people in all of the UK, including Mycroft and his parents, knew that he was (technically) a wizard.

Thus, while John saw Sherlock’s wand frequently these days, he very seldom actually saw Sherlock handle it. It sat on the bedside table each night, beside the recharging mobiles, amidst the other detritus from John’s pockets. Sometimes, John almost forgot that Sherlock had more hidden resources at hand.

Now was not one of those times.

He stood at the kitchen counter, gazing in horror at two teacups in which something was growing. Two somethings, in fact, each of them green, gelatinous, fuzzy, noisome and decidedly unsanitary. A third teacup lay in pieces beside these two, each piece discoloured, and the furry mould covering not only the inside, but the patterned outside of Mrs. Hudson’s finest and most dear china as well.

“Sherlock?”

As there was no response from behind him at the kitchen table, where Sherlock was raptly studying a slide in his microscope, John banged a few doors, picked up one of the offending cups, and slid it onto the table beside Sherlock’s right elbow.

“Right. Thank you,” murmured Sherlock.

John rolled his eyes. And waited. He wondered – briefly – if the contents of the teacup were more than a little poisonous. 

He hadn’t yet learned about bezoars, after all.

Eventually, Sherlock picked up the teacup and lifted it to his lips. He grimaced as his mouth made contact with the porcelain, and immediately set the cup down and glared at John.

“That,” John began, pointing at the teacup, “is Mrs. Hudson’s grandmother’s teacup. She _cherishes_ > that set, Sherlock. I am going out for an hour – no. _Three_ hours. And you are going to march downstairs and tell her what you’ve done to her grandmother’s tea service, and beg her forgiveness. And, if she evicts us, you’re going to find us a new flat, and pack all our belongings, and move them all. By yourself. Because this flat is the best thing that’s ever happened to me – well, aside from you – perhaps. And I’m going to be incredibly irritated if we lose it because you’ve turned her fine china into a mould garden. A shattered mould garden, at that.”

Sherlock had a very odd look on this face – not the kind of look that indicated that he was listening to John and taking everything he said to heart. He looked – well, _calculating_ , thought John. 

“There might be a way,” he said, picking up the teacup again and studying it. He turned it upside down atop the bare table and tapped on the bottom, then turned it upright again. The unidentified mass was exactly as it was before. He reached for a set of keys and stuck one of them into the cup, scraping along the edge. Unfortunately, these were John’s keys.

“Hey!” John snatched his keys away from Sherlock, wrinkling his nose. The smell emanating from the substance had been unpleasant before Sherlock disrupted the integrity of the ooze – now it was downright awful.

“I can fix this, John!” Sherlock looked positively excited as he dug into his pocket and extracted his wand and waved it about in the air in front of him.

Instinctively, John ducked out of the way. Perhaps he expected a bolt of molten white light to stab out from the wand and coalesce into that great winged thing again, though, in all honesty, he’d been at the receiving end of Mycroft’s wand and knew that not all spells were so dramatic.

Mycroft. Ah.

“Right – yes. That’s it. That scouring thing Mycroft did – to get your blood….”

Well then. He hadn’t exactly told Sherlock about that, had he?

Sherlock had let the wand drop down into his hand, which was now resting calmly on the table beside him. He was staring at John with his head canted just a bit to the side. 

“Do tell, John.” He tapped his wand on the table and seemed surprised when blue sparks shot out of the end. They skittered across the table and bounced on John’s laptop before disappearing. “Mycroft used magic on you?”

John frowned at his laptop. It had better power on or Sherlock was buying him a new one.

“He just cleaned me up a bit after we got to the hospital with you,” he said. “But you can use that scour thing on the teacups, can’t you?”

“Ah.” Sherlock looked vaguely out into the room, thinking. “The spell to clean things. A household spell, then. Third year, perhaps? Definitely by fourth form.” He swiveled his head toward John. “What was the incantation, John?”

John stared right back at him. He did not look pleased. How the hell did Sherlock expect him to remember a word Mycroft had said one time in his presence, when he was covered in Sherlock’s blood and had just been teleported from Magnussen’s office to a hospital where all the attendants wore lime green gowns?

“What word did he say?” He raised an eyebrow. John shook his head. “No? Fine. But you said scour. You wouldn’t use that word normally.” He had the wand in his hand as he tapped his finger against his nose, thinking. More blue sparks shot out, this time singing his hair. 

“Hey! Careful!” John patted at his hair, wondering if all the product Sherlock used made it flammable.

Sherlock batted his hand away, then exclaimed, “Ah! Scourgify! Ridiculous incantation – now, what was the wand movement for that one?”

“No clue,” John said. “Why don’t you call Mycro –”

“I am _not_ calling _Mycroft_ ,” Sherlock said, rather aggressively. “And John, I don’t want him to know about this. I don’t use magic unless absolutely necessary – and I’d have a hard time explaining to him how Mrs. Hudson’s teacups constitute a life or death matter.”

John rolled his eyes – again – and Sherlock stared at the teacup. “Swish and flick? Flick and swish?” He stabbed at the teacup and said “Scourgify!” in a rather commanding voice. 

The teacup tottered a bit, but certainly did not appear any cleaner.

Sherlock wiped the wand on a crumbled napkin that was lying, discarded, on the table.

“Does it work better when it’s clean?” John asked with mock innocence. He was reasonably certain the cleanliness of the wand had little or nothing to do with the effectiveness of the spell.

“It works better when I know the bloody wand movement,” snapped Sherlock. 

“Well, don’t you have an owner’s manual or something for that thing?”

He wasn’t serious, of course. In fact, he was smirking inside while maintaining a perfectly innocent expression. But Sherlock jumped up, startling him as he pushed past and headed for the bookshelves.

“Of course! My spell book!”

“Spell book?”

But Sherlock was already pulling a book off the top shelf. The book was enormous – so big that Sherlock needed two hands to carry it, so he stuck his wand behind his ear. He dropped the volume on the table beside his microscope, paged through it quickly, then extracted an extremely thin book with plain red binding and gold letters spelling out “Your Everyday Book of Spells” in old-fashioned cursive.

“You hid your spell book in an encyclopaedia?” 

“Encyclodaedia?” Sherlock now had the thin spell book open and was skimming through it. He motioned to the tome on the table. “This is Snow’s masterpiece – European Soil Types. I was certain enough you’d never open it to feel comfortable using it as a hiding place,” he said distractedly. He suddenly handed the small book to John. “Here – you find it. There’s an index of problems in the back – you cross reference to the page number of the spell that will solve your problem.”

“Dirty teacup?” John took the book and started paging through the index. It was impossibly long – the book looked like it was no more than fifty pages in length but the index had to be several hundred pages alone. He closed the book and looked at it suspiciously, turned it over to the back, then opened it again, frowning. “My God – here it is! Dirty teacup. Says _Try a Scourgify - page 412._ ”

He found the page in question and smoothed the book out on the table before him. “It’s a triple swish and a short diagonal flick,” he said, reading the instructions and watching the animated illustration in wonder.

“A _triple_ swish! Of course!” Sherlock made the depicted movement at the teacup – a rather complicated backward Z followed by a slicing motion and spoke the incantation. “Scourgify!”

The teacup spun like a carousel on steroids, even lifting off the ground a few inches as if ready to rocket into space. When it stopped spinning and was once again resting on the table, the unnamable gunk inside was gone and it looked like it had been freshly washed. It looked, in fact, like it had just been unwrapped from its original packaging.

“Now _that’s_ what I was talking about,” John said. He eyed Sherlock suspiciously. “You really forgot that spell? You haven’t been using it on yourself?” He didn’t think anyone could be as clean and fresh as Sherlock always appeared to be without the help of magic.

Sherlock looked affronted. “Magic could never replace the effect of good grooming,” he said with a small sniff. But even he looked quite impressed with the teacup, “I rather forgot – I suppose – how useful that spell can be. In a pinch.” He spoke those last words with particular emphasis, giving John a look that was meant to convey that he shouldn’t get accustomed to spurts of magical cleaning around 221B.

“Well, there’s another in the kitchen,” John said, pointing to the countertop where the other dirty teacup sat with its shattered partner. “I suppose you can’t do anything about the broken one?” he asked hopefully.

Sherlock frowned. “Yes? Perhaps?” He pushed the spell book in John’s general direction. “Look it up, why don’t you?”

And sure enough, in the index under “broken teacup” (for that, of course, was the problem that needed a remedy), was “Time for Reparo!” and the page number for the spell.

“Reparo? Really?” John was just barely avoiding giggling. “Scougify? Reparo? Who makes these things up?”

Sherlock was leaning over his shoulder now, scanning the page. “Spell crafters,” he murmured. “Bastardised Latin. An abomination. However….” He ran his fingers over the illustration. “Hmm. A lateral flick, protracted. And it says to mentally picture the item whole – not whole _again_ , but whole as it was before it was broken.”

He headed into the kitchen and John followed him, watching as Sherlock cleaned the second teacup, then, as an afterthought, the pile of fragments that constituted the third one. Finally, he considered the gleaming china fragments, flicked his wand sideways and commanded “Reparo.”

The newly repaired cup looked, to John’s eye at least, identical to the one sitting beside it. He picked it up – it felt no more fragile than any very old china teacup. It just _sparkled_ more.

“Right then,” he said, carefully setting the cup back on the counter. He hadn’t been aware of magic for very long, and he was still somewhat awed by the unbelievable concept of it. “Good. All good. Thank you.”

“If I’m finished here, then…” Sherlock said suggestively, looking back at his microscope. He was already slipping his wand back inside his shirt.

“No – wait!” John reached into his pocket and pulled out his mobile and thrust it at Sherlock. “Fix this.”

“I can’t fix electronics with _magic_ ,” protested Sherlock. He looked at John disapprovingly, obviously concerned that a fix-it fest was in the offing. “And I don’t like doing it at all, John.” He was whinging now. “I only did _this_ to save our flat.” It was clear to John from the tone of his voice that he didn’t actually think their flat had needed saving.

“And to make Mrs. Hudson happy, because you love her,” John added. “And because it was you who broke the teacup, and who muddied up the others. Just like it was you who broke my mobile.”

He tapped on the cracked glass in the upper right corner. 

“John – you don’t understand. Magic and electronics….”

“I do understand,” John cut in. “Mycroft explained it. But it’s just the glass that needs fixing – no chips or circuits or power supplies.” He shoved the mobile in Sherlock’s hands and folded his arms expectantly.

Sherlock gave an exaggerated sigh. 

“This is why I don’t do magic, John. So dull.”

John could think of about six hundred adjectives better than _dull_ to describe magic.

Nonetheless, Sherlock repeated the lateral flick, murmured “Reparo” and then handed John his mobile.

“Don’t blame me if it never works again,” he huffed. “I did try to warn you.”

John glanced at the device – the glass was whole again. He swiped his thumb across and checked his text messages – all worked flawlessly.

“Nice,” he said, smiling happily at Sherlock.

“You’re welcome.” Despite his attempt to appear grumpy about this protracted and dull use of magic, John knew Sherlock was pleased with himself, and pleased that John was happy as well.

“Now my laptop,” John said as Sherlock took three steps toward his microscope and the clutter that surrounded it.

Sherlock froze in place. His shoulders dropped and he let out an audible puff of air before turning around to face John again.

“Your laptop,” he repeated. It was not exactly a question.

“My laptop.” John pointed to it, in its usual position opposite Sherlock’s place at the table. “You remember how you broke my mobile, don’t you?”

“Vaguely.” Sherlock was evasive.

“You lobbed it at Mycroft and it bounced off his perfect half-Windsor knot and crashed on my laptop.”

“Ah.” Sherlock smiled. “He called me a surly child. He deserved it.”

John opened his mouth, then closed it quickly. Best not to point out the obvious here if he wanted his laptop back in tiptop shape.

“Well, it fell on my keyboard and knocked four keys off. I’d like my backspace back, please, and my delete key.”

“You do realise, if you’d close your laptop when you’re finished using it….”

“I was using my laptop at the time,” John reminded him, as calmly as possible. He put his hand on the small of Sherlock’s back and propelled him forward until Sherlock was standing in front of John’s laptop. John opened the laptop and pointed at the loose keys on the table beside it.

“I fail to see how those keys are important. You only need them if you make a mistake.” Sherlock glanced at John, clearly conveying that he himself wouldn’t need those keys, then extracted his wand once again. John nearly cooed in delight when the keys flew back in place. He tested them, then grinned broadly at Sherlock.

“I think, in time, you’ll find that magic is extremely dull, John,” Sherlock declared. 

“I doubt it,” John muttered. He took the teacup on the table back to the kitchen with the others, then squeezed behind Sherlock, bending to kiss his cheek as he passed.

“Thank you,” he said. ““And for the record, you’d still be brilliant even if you couldn’t do magic.”

ooOOOoo

Mrs. Hudson was beyond happy to have her teacups back.

“John – however did you get my teacups so clean?” she asked. She’d taken the teacups back to her rooms several days ago, and John hadn’t expected to hear anything more of it. Three teacups used, three returned in tiptop condition.

Too tiptop, it turned out. The teacups were quite old, and quite often used, and had apparently been a bit stained on the inside. When stacked with the fourth teacup, which had never quite made it up to 221B, the difference was appalling.

“Um – no idea,” he answered innocently, adding, “Sherlock washed them.”

Mrs. Hudson laughed. “ _Sherlock_ washed them?” She held a plate of shortbread biscuits in front of John, and he took one and looked expectantly at Sherlock, who’d been bored all afternoon and who, at the moment Mrs. Hudson had arrived, had just convinced John to come to bed and let him try out the spells John had found in the “Eighteen and Older” section of his all-purpose spell book. Spells, Sherlock noted, that were decidedly _not_ dull.

“And why is it so difficult to believe that I washed them?” asked Sherlock. He looked exceedingly grumpy.

“Oh, Sherlock. Don’t pout.” Mrs. Hudson pushed the plate of biscuits in his direction. He ignored it. “So – what did you use, then?”

He looked at her blankly.

“On the teacups, Sherlock. To clean them up so nice.”

Sherlock’s eyes traveled over to John. He looked murderous.

“Scouring powder.”

“Scouring powder? On my fine china? Oh, Sherlock! That’s like using scouring powder on your face!” Her voice was trailing away as Sherlock pushed her toward the door. “Or dish soap in your hair. Or nitric acid to cut the grease on the bathroom floor….”

“Thank you for the biscuits, Mrs. Hudson,” John called out as Sherlock shut the door firmly behind her and made his way directly to the bedroom.

“Just this once, dear,” she called back. “I’m not your….”

“Housekeeper. Right.” John took another bite of shortbread, then stood and followed Sherlock. He’d been hinting at those bedroom spells for two days now and Sherlock had finally caught on. _And_ he'd memorised the wand movement for every one of them, practicing with a left-over chopstick from their Chinese take-away. There'd be no awkward fumbling for the spell book in their bedroom when they had other things to accomplish.

No – magic certainly wasn’t dull, he thought as he lay spooned against Sherlock an hour later, secure in the knowledge that he’d never again be squeezing the last dollop of lube out of an overused tube, or worrying about premature ejaculation, or looking for the key to the handcuffs Sherlock had nicked from Lestrade. Invisible handcuffs and cock rings and _Lubricous_ aside, not to mention a refractory period of less than five minutes, Sherlock had been incredibly innovative this afternoon, perhaps intent on showing John that magic did not, indeed, make the man. 

Behind him, Sherlock kissed his back with an interested hum, and pressed slowly against him. The large hand on his belly moved lower, sliding fingers into the crease between belly and thigh, then cupping him as he kissed his shoulder blade, the nape of his neck.

“Sherlock – it’ been what – ten minutes?” He noted, however, that his cock had begun to take a vague interest in the proceedings. 

“You’ve created a monster, John.” 

John didn’t regret that, especially not when Sherlock used some of that handy magical lube on him and _damn_ if it didn’t seem to stretch and relax him too, and turn every bit of skin it touched into a needy pool of nerves that craved orgasm as much as the traditional parts, even his _knee_ , for Christ’s sake. But what he wasn’t quite prepared for was what came next – when Sherlock had the brilliant idea to use John as a test subject for some magical/non-magical experimentation. Sherlock the sex monster had side benefits John could live with; Sherlock the mad scientist monster decidedly did not.

“I can’t just _learn_ magic, Sherlock!” he protested the first time Sherlock broached the idea. 

“Oh, but John,” Sherlock answered with the conspiratorial smile that normally had him out of his chair and chasing down the stairs after Sherlock in a flash. “I do believe you can.”

_TBC in Part 3: John Watson, Muggle Test Subject_


End file.
